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Who can face down the postmodern madness of Trump?

Among the rubble of last year's political earthquake, America's spooked and confused Democrats are searching for a champion. But from a list of dotcom billionaires, liberal outriders and fame-hungry rookies, is there anyone who can face down the stage-hogging postmodern madness of Donald Trump?

Two weeks before the 8 November presidential election, I sat in Michael's restaurant in New York with a senior Republican operative who described her belief - and the reasonable belief of most political professionals - that the Republican Party was dead for a generation to come. The effective takeover of the party by its white-male populist wing had hopelessly tarnished the Republican brand among women and among significant parts of its donor class. She described a political apocalypse in which real Republicans would, in essence, have to forsake the Republican Party, leaving it to the rabble, and build a new political identity.

While it is, these days, always safe to predict apocalypse, it is not necessarily clear whose world is about to end. In this case, it was the Democratic Party - believing itself, days before the election, on the verge of a generational victory that would give it control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and reduce to rubble its opponents - which, in the blink of an eye, blew up.

The blast heard round the world took with it the central assumption of modern, liberal politics: the demographic eclipse of older, whiter, less educated ex-urban voters, by younger, diverse, more aspirational voters, congregating in global cities.

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The other shattered assumption was about the very nature of a political figure. Where liberals had exalted expertise and policy, the country elected a man with a flamboyant disregard of details and abstract reasoning.

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The Democrats, in the space of a few hours, went from being able to count on a winning social coalition and a deep bench of policy wonks and social engineers, to those party pillars having no currency at all in modern politics.

This was not just a sudden strategic setback, but just about as profound a psychological upset as has recently happened in political life. There were two clear effects here: on the part of some Democrats, the existential realisation that neither the liberal imagination nor analytic powers were capable of accurately understanding the current political world. This included a blind confidence in Hillary Clinton. It included too the mainstream media's total acquiescence to liberal certainties, such that not one outlet allowed for the possibility of a Donald Trump victory. All this produced a party in some state of deep depression. And then there were the liberals who could not accept that they were wrong, who, post-election, entered a state of rage and denial - blaming the loss on deep conspiracies and on the evil in the hearts of socially retro men - such that they continued to be at odds with the reality of this new political order. Here was a mania of righteousness and virtue.

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There’s no Democrat anywhere who is an obvious of plausible standard-bearer against Trump

It would be hard to think of anyone less prepared for this moment in political time than the two Democratic leaders most prominently left standing. Chuck Schumer, 66, the minority leader of the Senate, hails from the capital of millennial diversity, Brooklyn, New York, at a time when the Democrats' traditional Midwest working-class coalition has enthusiastically bought into Trumpian disdain for coastal elites. His counterpart in the House Of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, 77, represents that LGBT capital, the free state of San Francisco. Between them they had 66 years in Congress, one of the most reviled institutions in American life.

Together they represented another view of the Democrats' predicament: that nothing was terribly wrong. In this, Trump was just some odd bad weather. In fact, the demographic future was sure, and this was just, albeit unexpectedly, a last gasp of the old white man. The problem was not the Democrats, the problem was Clinton and her campaign. In April, a new book, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, spelled this out: Hillary Clinton, reflecting the very flaws of Hillary Clinton, had, spending vastly more than the Trump side, run a campaign ruined by rivalries, indecision and disorganisation. (And yet, of course, all losing campaigns look like losing campaigns after they have lost.) And, if it wasn't Hillary who lost it, it was the Russians who stole it, or the FBI's James Comey with his eleventh hour revival of the Clinton email scandal who caused the Democrats' defeat. There was, anyway, nothing fundamentally wrong with the Democratic Party.

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And yet, with the first 100 days of Donald Trump a wholly jaw-dropping spectacle of chaos, leaving him, at their end, the most unpopular president in modern history, there is still no Democrat anywhere who seems like an obvious or even plausible standard-bearer against him.

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The goal was to fight Trump with a better version of himself

It was, in its way, a moment of peculiar, or creative, foment outside the main power centres of the party. Part of the reflexive Democratic analysis, was to see the election of Trump not as economic and cultural warning, but as an issue of media and celebrity. In this, many Democrats saw themselves as needing such a figure. One ad-hoc Democratic group in California set out to draw up lists of billionaires who were more liberal than not and begin a campaign of reach-out and flattery.

The point here was, of course, not to see Trump as a throwback to older working-class values, but to see him as postmodern - a level of personal brand recognition that transcends electoral politics. In other words, fight Trump with a better version of himself.

The forward-thinking goal was to find the ideal, and willing, Democratic celebrity billionaire. The ultimate fantasy candidate, offering some teasing encouragement, was Oprah Winfrey, a celebrity billionaire who spoke to all the Democratic concerns - women, inclusiveness, minorities and holistic sensitivity - and who was not only a celebrity billionaire, but the world's first black female billionaire.

Populism is not so much a disdain for elites, but a mass revulsion against fake politicians

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To the extent that Trump was in some substantial part a phenomenon of the social-media age, then why not the ultimate phenomenon of the social-media age, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who also seemed suddenly to be thinking, "Why not?" At $61 billion, his net worth trounced even Trump's most aggressive exaggeration of his own at $10 billion. Trump at 74 in 2020 vs Zuckerberg, now at 32 not eligible to be president but in 2020 a year over the minimum age - a true referendum on the future, with the Democrats of course still believing that people would surely choose the future over the past.

In a more direct match-up, there was Mark Cuban, a dotcom billionaire from Texas who owns a professional sports team, is famous for his intemperate mouth and who, like Trump, is a reality TV star.

And add to the possible super-rich primary field Disney chief Bob Iger, seeing the presidency as a sort of mogul retirement job.

What's wrong with politics in the celebrity billionaire analysis is politicians. Populism is not so much a cry for economic equality, or even a disdain for elites, but a mass revulsion against the inauthenticity of politicians. Celebrities are real celebrities, politicians are fake ones. In this, Democrats figure to have an advantage, having cornered the market on a much higher class of celebrities than the Republicans ever have. (Trump was wounded by the failure of truly top-notch celebs to turn up at his inauguration celebrations.)

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Still, politicians are, of course, like roaches. They are not going to go away just because they have been rejected and humiliated.

Two years before there will be any meaningful clarity about the next presidential race, the field was a speculator's lament of dinosaurs and midgets.

Joe Biden, the former vice president, continued to represent a forehead-smacking what-might-have-been - a working-class everyman, he had, in 2016, yielded to an entitled-and-elitist Clinton. But Biden would be 78 in 2020, even older than Trump.

Hillary Clinton, with her three million margin in the popular vote, was, for a hardcore group of Democrats, the rightful president - save only for Russians and the FBI - and therefore a spectre, a 73-year-old one in 2020, who would continue to cloud the conversation.

Bernie Sanders' rightful due would also continue to be debated and added to what could be for the Democrats a forever postmortem, no matter that Sanders would be 79 in 2020.

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There is no indication that the Democrats have any plan for figuring out their future other than to wait until Trump exhausts himself

Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator representing the anti-Wall Street left of the Democratic Party, would be, at 71 in 2020, the youthful version of Sanders.

New Jersey's Cory Booker, one of two African-American Democrats in the Senate, and at a youthful 48 is often represented as a next Barack Obama, though one, for better or worse, with Trumpian-level media cravings.

And, because this is the Democratic Party, it is necessary that all discussion include a roster of women, no matter how far they actually are from presidential reality (of course, ever-repeated mentions draw you closer). Hence, from among the many no-name women on various lists, there emerges, most frequently and most improbably, Michelle Obama.

Another reliable sign of a complete dearth of options, inspiration or new ideas, is chatter about the long-diffused Kennedy family. In this there is Christopher Kennedy, the eighth child of Robert Kennedy who is running for governor of Illinois, and his cousin Ted Kennedy Jr perhaps running for governor of Connecticut, and Joe Kennedy III (grandson of Robert Kennedy), who is a third-term Massachusetts congressman.

The Democratic Party is hobbled now by both its lack of promising personalities and because, with no foresight, it found itself on the other side of a strange, protean and angry political current. The dominant strain of the Democratic Party is to be self-satisfied, while the character of the times is to be hostile and reactionary. But most of all the Democrats are paralysed by a stage that has room for only one player. There are no politics other than Trump. He is not only his own singular self, but his own worst enemy. He reduces everybody, including the opposition, to mere spectator. He may well implode, but that's bad news too: it is difficult to imagine greater energy and chaos than that which he himself creates.

It is a new political problem in which one side occupies all attention, media, time and interest, sometimes even all sides to all questions. And there is no indication that the Democrats have any plan or possibilities for figuring out their future other than to wait until Trump exhausts himself.